First Technical Committee Directors' Meeting in Brussels

“The CMAS TC had its first director’s meeting in Brussels on December 8th, 2017. The president of the LIFRAS Ms Pilar Ruiz Lopez welcomed the TC Director’s and thanked Mr Flemming Holm president of CMAS Technical Committee for choosing LIFRAS headquarters for the meeting.

At this meeting, the CMAS directors presented their business development projects for each commission (Standards & Equivalencies, Special Duties, Technical Diving, Education and Quality Control).

The good news is that the database and the E-learning are progressing very well, the draft manual has been completed, and the work on the database is almost finished.

Computer engineers and instructors are working hard to finish the job in a very short time.

An extensive quantity of work has been done to update and modernise our standards, for the moment the M*** standard has been revised and will soon be available on the website.

For the other standards, an assessment has been completed, and all the missing parts have been identified. By March 2018 all the standards (recreational and speciality diving) will be updated according to the technical advances of modern scuba diving.

The updated standards will have a more modern appearance will be put in an interactive indexed PDF format that is very easy for instructors to use.

The syllabus and the training programs will also be updated according to the E-learning database. The CMAS TC will put a lot of importance on modernism and also on quality training.

We have also been looking at the modernisation of Technical diving standards with newly updated visions that will allow us to align our standards with the world's technical agencies.

Further plans for the 1st CMAS Special Needs Diving Congress to be held in 2018 have been discussed and possible dates will be put forward to the CMAS BOD.

New proposals for Quality Control of CMAS Standards were discussed and will be put into operation immediately.

The President of the Commission for Dive Projects, Stef Teuwen joined the meeting and presented the CMAS 2018 expedition to the TC President and the Directors. A discussion was held and some ideas put on the table to assure the success of the project.

The meeting was very successful, with a lot of decisions were made and a large quantity work achieved. The cohesion of the group was optimum.